JENNIFER BENNETT
MAX STOCKLOSA with support from Florian Goldmann and Daniel Wolter

19.03. - 09.04.2016

Visual: Earth Flow

Sometimes Ai get electrified when Ai see this argillaceous earth. Ai’m now hearing the ancestral cry within Ai: Ai no longer seem to know who is the creature, the earth or Ai. And Ai get all confused. The same way we visualize some million years of earth history.
5 million years in 5minutes.

In a sense, organisms buried and sedimented within have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, dispersing special kinds of information-processing devices. If you just could get caught in between the membrane!

Visual: Levitated Mass

Push hard on Ai skin, and you’ll find that the source is two lumps of glass, metal, and plastic embedded in Ai right hand: a years-old magnet in the ring finger and a newer chip in Ai thumb webbing. Well, Ai come from the future, and Ai’m here to tell you: transcending the limits of the flesh can be downright dull.

Visual: Nasa whirlwind

Self-organization is an integral part of any living process or as Manuel DeLanda, artist philosopher from Mexico declares "... even the humblest forms of matter and energy have the potential for self- organization ..." This becomes obvious when the earth is examined to collect clay. The ground is vivid, there is a constant transformation happening and the different substances interact.
The European history is marked by the attempt to subjugate the self-organized process under a parent control. But as the result of an observed experiment differs from that of an unobserved, the attempt to organize self-organization on a superior level fails. It loses its potential for transformation. Where self-organization is institutionalized, it is endangered to be swallowed by bureaucratic processes and to loose it’s freedom of hierarchy.
Within self-organized processes new networks are established, which are unpredictable and the group as a whole can learn. It arises from the need of self-support, which makes it clear why this principle is so vivid in indigenous communities.
On a trip through South and North America in 2014, I had the chance to conduct interviews with many representatives of indigenous communities, which are gathered in the book Save, that will be published in 2016 with the Textem Publisher Hamburg. The lecture is based on it, in addition, film clips about various territorial occupations by indigenous groups from Canada, Mexico and the United States will be on display.
In the subsequent brainstorming and discussion, it is to find out how we ourselves realize that we may be indigenous or what makes us different, what claims we want to make and how we see the political system to ensure or to promote self-organizational behavior.

Temucuicui, Comunidad en Resistenciahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d1oQLSFjjA
A film about the municipality Temukuikui in Chile. Members of the Mapuche explain how they are discriminated by the Chilean government and condemned by applying the anti-terrorism law, which was introduced at the time of the Pinochet dictatorship 1973-1990. Many of the comunity members were in prison, and the situation is still tense today. The film is of 2009.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistancehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yP3srFvhKs
The film by the Canadian filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin with Abenaki descent about the crisis in Oka Quebec in 1990 shows, how the plan to convert a cemetery into a golf course located in the region of the Mohawk led to 78 day long permanent state of emergency. Police and activists erected barricades on both sides, a policeman was killed, and it was never clarified whether he was actually shot by the bullet of another policeman. After lengthy negotiations, the last barricades were dismantled on 26 September 1990 and the Warriors gave up their struggle. Only in 1997, the Canadian authorities purchased the land from the municipality of Oka and gave it back to the Mohawk.

We Are The Wind - Sea and air, our life, our fight. (Somos Viento)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YRoIVuXInI
Depicted is the situation in San Dionisio del Mar, Oaxaca / Mexico after the Consortium Marena renovable intends to implement the plans to build a huge wind farm in the region. The Ikoots defend themselves with barricades and win in the end, the project will be moved to a different place, where more protests and resistance can be expected. The film is from 2013, before it was clear that the project will not be implemented in San Dionisio.

We Shall Remain - Episode 5: Wounded Kneehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opbxnuw0Dw0
The film shows the takeover of the Wounded Knee Village in South Dakota in 1973 by activists of AIM (American Indian Movement). Wounded Knee is the site of the last armed resistance of the native Americans against the invaders. 1890 a whole community was killed there, a burial place reminds of the massacre. In 1973 Pine Ridge was troubled by their President Dick Wilson, who embezzled funds and employed his own private army, called Goons. Residents asked AIM for help. The occupation lasted 71 days. On May 8, the insurgents capitulated after the bombardment by a large contingent of FBI agents and National Guard had led to the death of an Oglala activist. There were more victims during the campaign and about sixty deaths in the years after, when Dick Wilson and his followers took bloody revenge. In 1976 Dick Wilson was voted out of office.

The most precise reality is that which shields reality. The most precise sensor is the one which lets us know upfront - so we don't need to know twice - that the impending calamity will unfold before our eyes in hq.
Tools of appropriation and monetization of an impending doom make the iminent thread rather attractive to live with.
Catastrophes to happen are profitable in the form of weather derivatives. Catastrophe bonds are but one reason why to employ climate scientist and mobilize all possible prediction tools at hand.

If the sensor is no more in need to be - then the de-sensor is activated. The de-activation or the re-activation? A look at the inbox or a look at the fruit isle? The image of the world and the images of the world are that dent on the retina.
Sky, bricks, cars, owls, inuits, satellites, statistics, seismographs.
There are a lot of them that attempt to get the whole picture.
The hole in the ozone layer is but one such image; its vastness escapes easy capture except by simulation and data visualization and thus is only ever experienced as a localized “aesthetic effect”, a sunburn…that is the way he puts it. (Timothy Morton).

PRE-SENSOR

The City Risk Index recently published by the world’s leading special insurance and reinsurance market Lloyd’s ranked Tokyo in second place in its overall rating.* It assessed threats to the economies of large cities based on anthropogenic as well as natural factors.
In Japan it is a well-known fact that the economic and administrative centre is vulnerable. Scientists estimate a probability of 70 per cent for a potentially devastating earthquake to happen within the next 30 years. This certainty is the root of a whole range of industries to do with the prognosis and insurance of large-scale risks as well as the prevention and mitigation of the consequences of catastrophic events. Meanwhile, what are the implications for the individual citizen of this prognosis that abstracts and quantifies risk with the aim of applying it to economic questions? In specifically designed training facilities, the population exercises to be prepared for the direct and indirect consequences of earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons or volcanic activities, using simulations and models. The routine exposure to preset risk scenarios is meant to generate a feeling of control and security in the face of prospective catastrophes. To what extent, however, will the repetition, the regular instruction using models or the simulation of particular scenarios, prepare the people for handling the incalculable, the unimaginable, which is inherent to the term catastrophe?

(cellphone): The latency of now. _ It carries its senses without doubt nor reason. Its overall access defines its lack of agenda. Its virtually absent. Its self-referential character, its non focus - that roots from its all over focus. The power to evade all of the outside - at the same time - capable to inhale all of it. If the everything is aimed for, then we can achieve a place with no reference points (spatial or time wise). Its high pitched focus, the diverse sensual abilities are said to be the users de-sensual abilities.

OFF-SENSOR

In June 2013 a group of us — artists and curators — traveled to Plymouth to tour the decommissioned nuclear-powered submarine HMS Courageous anchored at 3 Basin, HM Naval Base Devonport. (...) Our tour was conducted by a retired Officer Alan Jones who had worked for decades on various nuclear submarines overseeing their engineering and navigation systems. The Valiant-class of submarines were primarily used for surveillance, especially during the Cold War, and were tasked with trolling the waters of the North Atlantic and monitoring underwater activity that might be indicative of covert operations. Alan recounted one such sortie in which a strange new frequency was picked up somewhere off the coast of Sweden by the submarine’s passive sonar technology. This is essentially a mode of sonar directed towards attentive listening as opposed to active sonar, which emits pulses that bounce echoes back to the sub where they are logged and classified according to the kinds of objects that produce such sonic-signatures. However unable to identify this particular frequency and thus its source of emission, Alan’s nuclear submarine began to chase the sound as it moved in ever-changing configurations off the coast of Sweden, sometimes disappearing altogether and then re-appearing with more intensity somewhere else. For three-months a Royal Navy nuclear-powered submarine with a 100+ crew tracked an audio frequency as it parried and thrust, deflecting its technical prey beneath the waters of the Baltic Sea. When the submarine finally surfaced and returned to its base at Faslane, Scotland having been unsuccessful in its considerable efforts to unmask the sound, it was discovered that what they had been doggedly following for months was the sound of granular particles of sand being rubbed by the undulating motion of the waves.

SOURCE: Susan Schuppli

DE-SENSOR

To be sure, all we plan to do now is to explore our own immediate surroundings in the universe, the infinitely small place that the human race could reach even if it were to travel with the velocity of light. In view of man’s life span—the only absolute limitation left at the present moment—it is quite unlikely that he will ever go much farther. But even for this limited job, we have to leave the world of our senses and of our bodies not only in imagination but in reality.

The astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Heisenberg’s man—the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropocentric considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him.